Having disposed of the chief points in
the miracles of Jesus, the raising of the dead and the
healing of the sick, there is no need to dwell on the other
wonderful works attributed to him. For instance, there is
the miracle of turning water into wine recorded by St. John
as his very first miracle. It is clearly an invention, for
it does not behove a prophet of God to make people drunkards
as Jesus is said to have done at the marriage feast of Cana.
A prophet comes as a benefactor of humanity, and no one can
be said to have done any good to fellow men who helps, by
miracle or otherwise, in making men drunkards. But the
Qur'an, we are told, attributes to Jesus Christ two great
miracles, viz. a possession of the knowledge of the
unseen, and the power of creating life. And therefore it is
necessary to say a few words about these.

Before we go to the Qur'an, let us
see, however, how far the Gospels lend colour to these
claims. Now as regards the knowledge of the unseen, the
Gospels do not furnish the least evidence. On the other
hand, we are plainly told:

But of that day and that hour
knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven,
neither the son, but the
Father (Mark
13:32).

The knowledge of the unseen is here
clearly disclaimed. Some knowledge of the future is revealed
to the prophets of God, but unfortunately in the case of
Jesus even the slight knowledge that was disclosed to him
did not prove true according to the Gospels. He foretells
his own second coming in the following words:

For as the lightning cometh
out of the east, and shineth even unto the west; so shall
also the coming of the son of man be. For wheresoever the
carcase is, there will the eagles be gathered
together.

The commentators of the Gospels have
been at great pains to explain this. We are told for
instance that by the carcase is meant the sinful man
and by the eagles Jesus Christ, though the singular
form of the first and the plural of the second evidently
leads to the opposite conclusion; but taking this
explanation, it is very awkward that the coming of Jesus to
sinners should be likened to the gathering of the vultures
on a carcase. And then we are told:

Immediately after the
tribulation of those days shall the sun be darkened, and
the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall
fall from heaven ... and then shall appear the sign of
the Son of man in heaven. ... Verily I say unto you, this
generation shall not pass, till all these things be
fulfilled (Matt.
24:27-34).

That generation however passed away
without witnessing the truth of these words and many more
have followed. The promise failed, and the words of the
Gospel shall always be the best comment on the Christian
claim as to Jesus Christ's knowledge of the unseen. Blind
faith needs no argument; nor is it shaken by argument; but
the critical reader cannot find any explanation except that
Jesus made a mistake in interpreting the prophecy. I say
this in deference to Jesus' prophethood, though his own
followers go far beyond that and declare the mistake to be
due to Jesus' ignorance. The Rev. Dummelow says:

Plumptre considers `the
boldest answer as the truest and most reverential,' and
finds the explanation in Christ's ignorance of
that day and hour
(Mark 13:32). Even if we
assume, with Plumptre, complete ignorance of the date, we
are no nearer a solution; for if he did not know the
date, he would not attempt to fix it.

With such statements in the Gospels,
he would be a very bold Christian who would proclaim to the
world that Jesus had knowledge of the unseen. Even if the
Holy Qur'an had said what is ascribed to it, it does not
seem befitting for a Christian to give the lie to his own
sacred scriptures and to produce the Qur'an, which he
believes to be an imposture, in support of his statement.
What he says to a Muslim is this: You must accept Jesus as
being above a mortal because the Qur'an says he had
knowledge of the unseen, and when you have accepted him as
such, you must believe in the Gospels and, on their basis,
in the fact that he had no knowledge of the unseen. Could
logic ever be more queer?

As regards the Holy Qur'an, it nowhere
speaks of Jesus Christ as having the knowledge of the
unseen. All that it says is this:

And I inform you of what you
should eat and what you should store in your
houses
(3:48).

Here Jesus does not say that he knows
what John ate last evening and what Peter left in his house
which would be childish, but that he told people what they
should eat and what they should store, and this was indeed
what Jesus did when he said:

Lay not up for yourselves
treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt,
and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for
yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor
rust doth corrupt and where thieves do not break through
or steal for where your treasure is, there will your
heart be also (Matt.
6:19-21).

And again:

Therefore take no thought,
saying, what shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or,
Wherewithal shall we be clothed? ... Take therefore no
thought for the morrow; for the morrow shall take thought
for the things of itself
(6:31, 34).

How well does the Christian world act
up to these teachings!

The question of Jesus' knowledge of
the unseen being thus disposed of, there remains now the
allegation that Jesus created things. Had there been any
truth in this, the Gospel writers who were so much given to
exaggeration that they transformed the ordinary incidents of
his life into wondrous deeds, would not have left this
unnoticed. Nor does the Holy Qur'an anywhere call Jesus a
creator. On the other hand, it denies any such power in
Jesus or any other person or thing taken for a god. Thus it
says:

Or have they set up with
Allah associates who have created creation like His, so
that what is created became confused to them? Say: Allah
is the Creator of all things and He is the One, the
Supreme
(13:16).

This argument is as much against the
divinity of Jesus as of any other person or thing, and the
theory that the creation of certain things is ascribed to
Jesus by the Holy Qur'an cannot stand for a moment against
this. This misunderstanding is due to two different
significances of the word khalq, the primary
significance being measuring, proportioning or
determining the measure or proportion of a
thing, while the other significance is creating.
All the Arabic lexicons agree on this; for facility I may
refer the reader to Lane's Arabic-English Lexicon.
The word is extensively used in its primary significance in
Arabic literature, and Lane quotes several instances. Thus
khalaq al-adim-a means, he measured or
proportioned the hide, khalaq an-na'l-a means, he
determined the measure of the sandal, and so on. It is
in this sense that the commentators interpret the word
khalq as used about Jesus in 3:48, and even Lane
accepts the same interpretation, for he thus translates the
words inni akhluq-u lakum; "I will make according to its
proper measure for you." The commentators of the Holy
Qur'an moreover say that the form thus proportioned did not
actually turn into a bird: see the remark of Wahb
quoted in the Ruh al-Ma`ani, that it was simply a
momentary sight and the thing turned into dust
immediately.

The performance at any rate, if really
the form of a bird was made by Jesus, is far inferior to the
grand miracle of Moses whose staff turned into a serpent.
But it must be borne in mind that Jesus Christ spoke more in
parables and metaphoric language than in plain words, and in
this case too what he really meant was not the making of the
figures of birds, a performance which had nothing to do with
the work of a prophet, but the breathing of a spirit into
his followers which should make them soar like birds in the
higher spiritual regions.